Not much is easier than bioblitzing a hospital room (provided you restrict yourself to macroscopic life). Jordan Charles came into this world at 7 lb 12 ounces, and covered in fur. The fur, of course, is lanugo, an interesting mystery of evolution in its own right, and also a possible piece of the larger puzzle of human hairlessness.
September 30, 2008
Homo sapiens!
September 24, 2008
Beach bugs.
Despite spending some time with What’s that bug, I can’t identify the millipede, spider, or bees above. The flower, of course, is Goldenrod. A reddish centipede, 3 cm long, shared a pit trap with the spider, but the photo is kind of blurry.
September 21, 2008
Ottawa River
Here for the weekend, I’ll try to see who lives on the beach. Here are my over/unders:
Plants: 24
Birds: 5
Bugs and other crunchy things (phylum arthropoda): 24
Rodents: 2
Bivalves: ?
September 19, 2008
Blogger Bioblitz portal and crowdsourcing tool.
September 9, 2008
2008 Blogger Bioblitz Announced.
The 2008 blogger bioblitz is on for the week of Sept. 20 - Sept. 28. (Two weekends to work with!) Blindingly soon, yes, but what the heck.
A portal will be up next week with a data spreadsheet for download; instructions on conducting a blitz; and some basic browsing and querying capabilities.
Keen to put our semantic eco-blogging tools to use, the Spire project has volunteered to do this year’s data integration and analysis. If you want to share your observations, you will be able to contribute data any of 3 ways: by uploading your data spreadsheet; by maintaining an on-line spreadsheet (via, e.g., Google Docs); or by using Spotter to automatically generate an RDF record for each taxon observed. If you do one of the first two options, you’re data will be converted to RDF by rdf123. (Note: Spotter is currently broken on Firefox 3 - we hope to fix this shortly. UPDATE : Fixed.)
Our goal (beyond encouraging people to explore their natural environment) is to integrate data we receive with background and contextual data (e.g. invasive species lists, food webs, etc.), put it on a map, and make it browsable. Our broader goal is to develop technology that transforms bioblitz and eco-blog data into a global human sensor-net.
If you plan on participating, please either leave a comment on this site or send me email, so that we can link to your blog from the portal.
Many thanks to all who get involved!